Journal of World History, vol. 23, no. 4 (2012)

ARTICLES

This article discusses Juliana Dias da Costa (d. 1734), an influential Portuguese woman at the court of the Mughal king Bahadur Shah I (d. 1712). Through an analysis of sources that traverse three centuries and several languages, this article demonstrates how visions of Juliana were shaped by the political aspirations of those writing about her. To Jesuits, Juliana was a proxy for their mission in India, and to the Portuguese, she was one of their own, strategically placed at court to serve their interests. And for her impoverished descendants in British India, she was emblematic of times when they held both power and prestige. Concluding with the author’s encounter with a descendant of Juliana’s in Pakistan, this article addresses questions of belonging that a figure such as Juliana raises today.

This article offers an in-depth discussion of the theory of civilization of Shāh Walī Allāh of Delhi, a prominent Muslim scholar in eighteenth-century India. It shows that Shāh Walī Allāh articulates a naturalistic understanding of the genesis of social life and the evolution of civilization, outlines the factors involved in the decline of the state and the empire, and sets forth a program for dealing with a broad range of emergencies. It explores the ways in which Shāh Walī Allāh’s thought relates to previous Islamic political discourse, notably the akhlāq (Ṭūsī, Dawwānī) and Indo-Islamic (Baranī, Abū’l-Faẓl) traditions of political thought. It also investigates Shāh Walī Allāh’s use of the Byzantine paradigm as a heuristic device to trace the causes of the dissolution of the Mughal Empire. The article looks at Shāh Walī Allāh’s analysis of Byzantine decline from a cross-cultural perspective and places him in conversation with Byzantine political writers who discuss the factors that led to the decay of the Byzantine Empire.

This article compares the fictional rhetoric in late imperial China with that of eighteenth-century England to explain how political rhetoricians could justify the existence of ministerial factions at court by representing them as loyal servants of the public good. Yet, historical contingency and different alignments of state and society produced divergent discourses of political authority in China, where faction was deplored, and England, where partisan divisions were increasingly accepted. While limited monarchy and parliamentary governments made English partisanship defensible, Chinese rhetoricians of the Song and Ming dynasties failed to articulate political interests that were independent from the unitary monarchy they served.

Hester Lynch Piozzi’s Retrospection is little discussed in the historiography of world history. This article explores Piozzi’s composition, publication, and repeated reinscription of the work from the mid 1780s to her death in 1821, and locates it within her varied efforts at describing a social index of affinity and cohesion. Drawing out this dimension of the work highlights the opportunity to connect textual annotation with another nineteenth-century textual expression of social relationship—photography—and thereby provides an avenue to expand John Sutton’s research on physical “exograms” through a consideration of desired as well as actual relationships. In this way, Retrospection—and world histories—are seen as opportunities for authors to bind themselves to the “middlebrow” communities of friend-readers, and thus as works of far “smaller compass” than traditional analyses of imperial and national themes would suggest.

Is the modern Mediterranean one place with a common history? Or several places, riven by colonialism? Viewed from a global perspective, the Mediterranean region has enjoyed a common historical experience since 1500. Increasingly semiperipheral with respect to the world capitalist system, and characterized by weak state structures, delayed or muffled class formation, agrarian backwardness, and the persistence of pastoralism, the coming to modernity of the Mediterranean thus foreshadows the historical experience of the Third World in its unity and diversity. This article offers some strategies for approaching the modern Mediterranean as a new object of world historical study.